Marketing K-Pop and J-Pop in the 21St Century Sarah Brand Dickinson College

Dickinson College Dickinson Scholar Student Honors Theses By Year Student Honors Theses 5-21-2017 Marketing K-Pop and J-Pop in the 21st Century Sarah Brand Dickinson College Follow this and additional works at: http://scholar.dickinson.edu/student_honors Part of the Asian Studies Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Japanese Studies Commons, Korean Studies Commons, Music Commons, and the Other Film and Media Studies Commons Recommended Citation Brand, Sarah, "Marketing K-Pop and J-Pop in the 21st Century" (2017). Dickinson College Honors Theses. Paper 266. This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Dickinson Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MARKETING K-POP AND J-POP IN THE 21ST CENTURY Sarah Brand Senior Thesis Department of East Asian Studies Dickinson College May 10, 2017 Brand 2017 Music is an important part of daily life and, as a result, an integral part of culture. The way in which individuals are exposed to different genres and types of music helps illustrate the extent to which globalization has had an impact on the world. Before the invention of the internet, music was only available for purchase to consumers who went to record stores and physically purchased goods. Now, countless unique songs and genres are readily available with just a single search. Due to how easily consumers can access new music, digital distribution has completely overtaken the profit from selling physical copies of albums. In 2006, record labels still made $9.4 billion from CD sales in the United States, despite the fact that digital distribution entities, such as Napster and iTunes, provided digital copies of the same songs. Yet, only a decade later, CD sales reaped a mere $1.5 billion—a drop of 84 percent (Sisario and Russel 2016). This significant change has pushed companies within the industry to adjust their marketing strategies to fit within this new model of consumption. Since the proliferation of the internet, music industries across the world have felt its immense impact on the purchasing of music. While some record companies, similar to the United States’ struggling industry, have been slow or even unwilling to adapt their marketing strategies, others have eagerly shifted their business strategies. Take Japan and South Korea, for instance. Even though the majority of Japanese cultural products, such as manga and anime, have experienced an impressive amount of global success, the Japanese music industry has made little effort to extend that success to their sector. The South Korean popular music industry, on the other hand, has actively promoted the globalization of their music, mostly through the use of social networking sites (SNS). 2 Brand 2017 So, what explains this variance in marketing strategies within the Japanese and Korean popular music industry? Why has Japan not capitalized on the global success experienced by their other cultural exports? Why has South Korea put so much focus on globalizing their music industry? By analyzing and comparing the difference between the business strategies, we are able to not only better understand the impact globalization has had on music industries in general, but also how the distribution of music as a cultural export illustrates the priority these industries’ place on soft power. Korean popular music, or more commonly known as “K-pop,” has, without a doubt, become a global force. While some scholars were quick to judge the Korean Wave (or Hallyu as it is called in Korean) as a fad, the unprecedented success and worldwide popularity of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” in 2012 sparked further interest in the growth of the Korean music industry and it became increasingly clear that this phenomenon was more than just a passing trend. Many works focus on understanding the origins of the Korean Wave and exploring the hybridization of the genre. Some authors argue that K-pop is simply a repackaged version of either Japanese popular music (J-pop for short) or American styles and has failed to find its own significant “Koreanness” (Nam 2013; Jin and Ryoo 2014; Jin 2016). Others see K-pop as a separate entity that has successfully differentiated itself from other genres through its marketing techniques and training programs (Oh and Lee 2013; Park 2013; Howard 2014). Even though just a few decades ago J-pop experienced much of the same popularity we now see within the Korean popular music industry (Ng 2002; Iwabuchi 2006), it is interesting to note that not much has been recently written on the Japanese music industry. While there have been articles analyzing the sales and shift in the turnover rates of J-pop (Asai 2008; Asai 2008a; 3 Brand 2017 Asai 2009), there has been little discussion of the significance and the reasons behind this shift in the domination of the entertainment industry within the region. By comparing the Japanese popular music market and its Korean counterpart, I hope to highlight how the impact of the internet, and the subsequent globalization of the music market, has had a significant influence on the countries’ soft power on both the East Asian region and the world stage. Both Japanese and Korean cultural commodities have experienced an immense amount of popularity both inside and outside of their regional area, making these two nations intriguing points of analysis. Korea especially took the world by surprise since, prior to the 1990’s, transnational popular culture in Asia had usually been associated with the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong (Joo 2011) and the nation has now become the first among non-Western countries to “meaningfully export almost all of its cultural forms… to both Western and non- Western countries” (Jin 2016, viii). Since it would be impossible within the scope of this paper to explore the significance of all of the cultural exports of these two countries, I have decided to focus on the music industry for two main reasons. First of all, during the 1990’s, the proliferation of J-pop across the East Asian region is often cited as one of the main factors of the “Japanization” of the region. This provided a roadmap for other East Asian countries to follow a similar route. Following in Japan’s footsteps, K-pop has become the most significant component of the Korean Wave—in 2014 Korea exported more than 275 million dollars-worth of Korean popular music which is a massive increase when compared to the 31.2 million dollars only five years earlier (Jin 2016, 119). Secondly, the music industry has one of the most overt connections to the Internet with the use of digital downloads of singles, overall digitization of the production process, and, more importantly, the integration of YouTube and other streaming sites in the consumption patterns. 4 Brand 2017 By analyzing the ways in which the major record companies’ marketing strategies in both Japan and Korea have adapted to the introduction and proliferation of the internet, we can attempt to better understand the value these cultural industries, and by extension the nation itself, place on soft power. In order to provide necessary background information, this paper will first give a brief history of the Japanese and Korean popular music industries and go into detail about the distinct features of both industries. After having a basic understanding of the elements of these two industries, this paper will then explore three main reasons as to why these two countries’ major record companies had such differing responses to the proliferation of the internet and the globalization of their music: the need to expand to an audience beyond the domestic market, a concern for copyright violations and piracy, and the desire to achieve global influence and soft power through the export of cultural goods. I will then use a case study analyzing two of Japan and South Korea’s largest recording companies’, Sony Music Entertainment Japan and SM Entertainment respectively, use of YouTube to illustrate these findings within the current global market. History of J-Pop and K-Pop Although the history of both Japanese and Korean popular music has deep and varied historical roots, for the purposes of this paper I will be mainly focusing on the industries from the 1990’s on. There are several reasons for this. Not only did the terms “J-pop” and “K-pop” originate during this time period, this decade also saw the integration of two of the industries’ most lucrative marketing strategies, the “idol system” and the “tie-up system” (which will be discussed in further detail later). With the proliferation of new technological advancements, 5 Brand 2017 televisions, the Internet, etc., this decade presented an entirely new set of challenges, and opportunities, for the two industries. Furthermore, both countries witnessed unprecedented success within their cultural production in the 1990’s with Japan becoming the second largest music industry in the world (second only to the United States) and South Korea’s rapid economic growth, that began in the mid 1980’s, which provided a solid framework for the country to start investing more in its cultural production, with a focus on the music industry (Lee 2013, 28). The growing popularity of televisions in Japan in the late 1950’s, and the subsequent American drama serials that often illustrated the benefits of an American middle-class quality of life, had a great influence on Japanese society. Especially with the promotion of “the three treasures” which were, in the 1950’s, the “three S’s,” senpūki, sentakuki, and suihanki (the electric fan, the washing machine, and the electric rice cooker), and the “three C’s” of the 1960’s, car, cooler (air conditioner), and color television, society began to place more emphasis on consumer culture than ever before.

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